Database Management

Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMSs) continue to do the heavy lifting in data management, while newer database management systems are taking on prominent roles as well. NoSQL database systems such as Key-Value, Column Family, Graph, and Document databases, are gaining acceptance due to their ability to handle unstructured and semi-structured data. MultiValue, sometimes called the fifth NoSQL database, is also a well-established database management technology which continues to evolve to address new enterprise requirements.

Database Management Articles

Attunity, a provider of data integration and big data management software solutions, is improving the data governance capabilities in its data integration platform to support organizations moving data to clouds and data lakes. Attunity's enhanced metadata and data lineage capabilities are designed to help users understand what the source of the data is, and highlight any modifications or transformations within the Attunity platform that have been applied.

Coinciding with the International Supercomputing Conference, the TOP500 List of supercomputers has been announced. For the first time since November 2012, the U.S. claimed the most powerful supercomputer in the world, leading a significant turnover in which four of the five top systems were either new or substantially upgraded. With the announcement, the TOP500 is also marking its 25th anniversary.

Oracle recently announced general availability of Oracle Application Express (APEX) 18.1, a low-code rapid application development platform that can run in any Oracle Database and is included with every Oracle Database Cloud Service. APEX enables users to develop, design, and deploy data-driven desktop and mobile applications using only a browser.

Immuta revealed it has raised $20 million in Series B funding, which will be used to accelerate global customer growth and extend product leadership. The funding round was led by DFJ Growth, with participation from new investors, Dell Technologies Capital and Citi Ventures, and existing investors, Drive Capital and Greycroft.

BlueData, provider of a Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS) software platform, is releasing updates for its BlueData EPIC platform, building upon innovations for large-scale distributed analytics and machine learning (ML) workloads on Docker containers. This summer release is the result of collaboration with BlueData's enterprise customers to develop new functionality in each of these areas to support their Big Data and AI initiatives - as they extend well beyond Hadoop and Spark to a range of different ML / DL and data science workloads, and beyond on-premises infrastructure to public cloud and hybrid architectures.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is planning to invest $4 billion in Intelligent Edge technologies and services over the next four years. Specifically, HPE will invest in research and development to advance and innovate new products, services and consumption models across a number of technology domains such as security, AI and machine learning, automation, and edge computing.

NGINX, which offers a suite of technologies designed to develop and deliver modern applications, has raised $43 million in Series C funding led by Goldman Sachs Growth Equity. Stating that application modernization is imperative to achieving successful digital outcomes and drives increased enterprise adoption of microservices architecture to complement legacy applications and support evolving application demands, NGINX says it seeks to capitalize on the opportunity and help enterprises in their modernization journey - a market projected to reach $32.01 billion by 2023 and growing at more than 16% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

Crate.io, developer of CrateDB, a provider of an open source SQL database, is receiving $11 million in series A funding, along with boosting the commercially-available Crate Machine Data Platform and version 3.0 of the open source CrateDB.Based on its years of experience working with machine data innovators, Crate.io is introducing the Crate Machine Data Platform. The Crate Machine Data Platform helps companies put machine data to work even faster, by simplifying the time-consuming job of building and operating the data management "plumbing" that forms the foundation for IoT systems.

InfluxData, provider of an open source platform built specifically for metrics, events, and other time series data, has released new capabilities targeted at speeding the visualization and analysis of structured application and system events captured via log files. Now, by correlating business, server, and application metrics with structured logs, InfluxData provides faster and more precise problem investigation and root-cause analysis capabilities.

A modern data architecture for business intelligence and analytics has to support structured, unstructured, and semi-structured sources, as well as hybrid integration and also meet the analytical needs of a wide range of users spanning casual information consumers, power users, and data scientists. At Data Summit 2018, Richard Sherman, managing partner of the consultancy Athena IT Solutions, presented a talk on "Designing a Data Architecture for Modern Business Intelligence & Analytics." Sherman cautioned against falling into the "one-tool-fits-all" trap.

Software AG has acquired a visual data analytics product line for the manufacturing and process industry that is intended to complement Software AG's Cumulocity Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 product portfolio. TrendMiner enables enterprises to recognize patterns and trends in their process data, identify production irregularities, and adapt necessary process adjustments early—without the need for support from IT specialists or data scientists.

Innovative vendors are helping to point the way forward with technologies and services to take advantage of the wealth of data that is pouring into companies. This sixth DBTA 100 list spans a wide variety of companies that are each addressing the evolving demands for hardware, software, and services. Some are long-standing companies with well-established offerings that have evolved over time, while others are much newer to the data scene.

Collibra, a provider of enterprise data governance and catalog software, has introduced Collibra 5.4 which adds new crowdsourced social functionality. The new capabilities leverage the knowledge and insights of business users across an organization to allow them to rate and review data assets and extend data governance engagement and collaboration.

At Data Summit 2018 in Boston just 2 days before GDPR went into effect, Kristina Podnar, digital policy consultant, NativeTrust Consulting, LLC, presented a talk on what you need to know to become compliant with the new regulation—and maintain compliance. In her presentation, Podnar cut through the legal and regulatory noise, taking the 99 articles of GDPR and distilling them into 10 key areas so attendees could identify the things that they really need to deal with—and those that do not apply.

Blockchain, the distributed ledger technology, was explored in a 3-hour Data Summit 2018 presentation led by Paul Tatro, who covered the wide range of blockchain topics including what it is, the differences between public and private blockchains, use cases, and the meaning of terms such as "smart contracts," "blocks," "nonces," "hashes," "oracles," and digital signatures.

Since the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took effect in May 2018, organizations have hopefully already emerged from the strategy phase and are now well into implementation. However, the nuances of GDPR are something most of us are still trying to comprehend—and we probably won't truly understand all of it for a while. In the hustle to reach compliance, errors will likely have been made. In the process of GDPR planning and execution, there are four key areas that companies need to be wary of. If not managed carefully, they can slow down the process of achieving, and maintaining, compliance goals.

Cloudera, Inc. is introducing new innovations to help businesses operationalize data insights faster by making data scientists and data engineers more productive. New machine learning capabilities make it easier for data scientists to quickly train and deploy models with higher confidence and lower risk.

SolarWinds is making a series of updates to its network management product portfolio, allowing the platform to support networks up to four times larger. This improvement makes it easy to consolidate monitoring solutions to a single provider enterprise-wise, and gives IT professionals' far greater flexibility to scale up and support larger data center networks as workloads increase, or scale out to address complex distributed networks.

As Hadoop adoption in the enterprise continues to grow, so does commitment to the data lake strategy. DBTA recently held a webinar with Mark Van de Wiel, CTO, HVR, Dale Kim, Sr. director, products/solutions, Arcadia Data, and Rick Golba, product marketing manager, Percona, who discussed unlocking the power of the data lake.

It may seem strange to see MongoDB expanding the very features of the relational databases that it originally rejected. In the last few releases, we've seen implementation of joins, strict schemas, and now ACID transactions. However, what this indicates is that MongoDB is increasingly contending for serious enterprise database workloads: MongoDB is expanding the scope of its ambitions.

Whether you're an Oracle system or database administrator, an IT manager, or executive, or even just an end user or customer, security should be as important to you as almost anything else. We all hear about breaches in the news all too often. From the executive level to the end customer, none of us want to be anywhere near such a breach.

With all of the data breaches and accusations of improper data usage in the news these days, the question of who owns data looms large. Understanding who owns which data is a complex question that can't be answered quickly or easily.

Under usual circumstances, the one-to-many or many-to-many relationship, alone, drives the pattern used within the database model. Certainly, the logical database model should represent the proper business semantics of the situation. But on the physical side, there may exist extenuating circumstances that would cause a data modeler to consider including an associative table construct for a one-to-many relationship.

It's spring-cleaning season, meaning many diligent homeowners are busy trying to organize their closets and homes in preparation for the spring and summer. Organizations, both small and large, also must keep up with cleaning their virtual dust bunnies on a regular basis, just as one would do within their own home.

Kore Technologies, a provider of enterprise integration and eCommerce solutions, is releasing version 4.5 of Kourier Integrator Data Management, further enhancing cloud capabilities. Users will see new benefits for Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The update provides enhanced functionality and higher performance when doing integration and data warehousing with Microsoft SQL Server in the cloud.

In an upcoming webinar with DBTA, Revelation Software will present an overview covering the latest updates to OpenInsight. OI 10 has been re-engineered for 64-bit in this new release. Revelation has rewritten nearly every bit of code in the product, from the interface with the user, to the reporting tools, to the speed of the indexing routines.

Pure Storage, an all flash storage platform, is releasing portfolio updates, developing a new vision for how businesses can implement a data strategy. Pure Storage is expanding its FlashArray product line to now deliver cost-effective all-NVMe Shared Accelerated Storage for every workload.

Looker, a data platform provider, is releasing new tools and integrations to optimize data science workflows. Looker is improving its governed data workflow with an SDK for R and connections for Python, as well as streamed and merged results, Google TensorFlow integrations, and clean, visual recommendations for users.

Reltio, provider of a self-learning data platform, has secured a $45 million Series D investment to accelerate innovation, fuel international expansion, and ramp support for global enterprise customers. With current investor New Enterprise Associates (NEA) leading this round, and participation from other existing investors, Crosslink Capital, .406 Ventures, and Sapphire Ventures, Reltio has now raised $117 million in total.

Cloud-driven automation is creating the need for an evolution throughout IT and the enterprise. DBTA recently held a webcast featuring Joe McKendrick, independent analyst and author, and Maria Colgan, Oracle master product manager, who examined how cloud is driving change and how Oracle can help.

Paul Sonderegger, senior data strategist, Oracle, looked at the way data technologies are evolving to help organizations extract more value from the wealth of data being collected during a keynote at Data Summit 2018.

Today, it is not enough to understand what happened, organizations want to have a view of what is happening now so they can impact the future. At Data Summit, Dan Potter, vice president of product management and marketing, Attunity, looked at what it takes to become a real time enterprise and the role of change data capture in enabling the transformation.

For many businesses, data and artificial intelligence pose opportunities but also risk. Hadley Reynolds, co-founder of the Cognitive Computing Consortium, presented a keynote looking at the ramifications of AI and cognitive computing and showcased an open reference framework jointly developed by the consortium with Babson College's technology management program.

DataOps is emerging as a methodology for data scientists, developers, and other data-focused professionals to enable an agile workflow while also adhering to data governance requirements. Kellyn Pot'Vin-Gorman, Technical Intelligence Manager, Delphix, presented her session, "Making Big Data Bite-Size with DataOps" on Wednesday, May 23, 2018 during Data Summit 2018. Pot'Vin-Gorman discussed how to move from simple DevOps with tools and automation, while making the data central to the solution.

As organizations undergo digital transformation to analyze and query large amounts of data at high speeds, they are increasingly leveraging graph databases to illuminate information about connections. The result is that 2018 will be a big year for graph technology, according to Sean Martin, CTO of Cambridge Semantics, and Scott Heath, CRO, Expero.